Whole Foods offer brings radical changes for Rad Soap Co.

ALBANY -- Sue Kerber was selling her homemade soaps and creams at the winter Troy Farmers' Market she was approached by a woman from Whole Foods. They wanted to talk with the local soapmaker about the possibility of distributing her soaps across the northeast.

At that time, Sue, her husband Greg, and her son Zak were making their hot-processed soaps and creams in the kitchen of their house in Cohoes. Despite moderate success, they were not expecting that their company, Rad Soap Co., would attract a national, hyper-local supermarket chain like Whole Foods to their table at the Troy Farmers' Market.

"I figured you can't get into Whole Foods unless you're down in at the Brooklyn Flea Market, if you're written up by Oprah, if you're on The Today Show, or if you've solved some major problem and they see you, usually in New York City," said Sue. "It's not like Whole Foods comes up here."

That day, however, Whole Foods was "up here." After exchanging business cards, Sue received a call the very next Monday -- her birthday -- from a Whole Foods representative. They wanted her to submit an application.

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"What a birthday gift," said Sue. "We were screaming."

Seven months later, the family has moved into a 4,000 square foot warehouse at the intersection of Fuller Road and Railroad Avenue, but the path has not been easy.

"It takes awhile to get into their process," said Sue. As she explained, Whole Foods' supplier requirements are very stringent. It took Rad Soap Co. six months before they could send their first shipment to a Whole Foods store -- in Ridgefield, New Jersey -- but since then, they have signed up five more stores.

With those stores, Sue is looking to prove her product. After that, she is hoping to have her products in 11 Whole Foods by the end of August, with products on display throughout the chain's 30 northeastern stores as soon as possible thereafter. For right now, the Kerbers are focused on transforming a literally in-house craft business into a fully formed wholesale operation.

Before Whole Foods, weekly soap production was based on Sue's estimate of the volume of sales farmers markets and craft fairs would yield. Until they moved into the new space, they were producing 3,000 bars of soap - all inside the kitchen of their Cohoes home.

Since their inception seven years ago, Sue and Rad Soap Co. has been producing their soaps, creams, at home. They now offer a variety of soaps -- hemp, beer and wine -- that are made with local ingredients, such as a soap made with coffee brewed at Spill'n the Beans Coffeehouse & Bistro in Troy. Now, soap production has to drastically increase. "We are going to get slammed by Whole Foods," said Greg.

That entails providing displays for their soaps; tightly tracking their supplies, orders, and sales; and hiring new -- non-familial -- employees. "We're big fans of nepotism, but we've run out of family members," said Greg, facetiously. They have hired seven employees thus far, and plan to have 12 by the end of the year.

As they expand their production, they are expanding their product line, but it is how their products will be displayed that has the soapmaking family excited. They recently commissioned a series of shelving units from an Albany company -- Silver Fox Salvage -- that specializes in reusing Victorian-era architectural elements that defy standard display cases.

In a take on a steampunk aesthetic, which incorporates elements of 19th century style, the Kerber family is having display cases built using reclaimed architectural elements. Their first shelf was built using wood shelves from the Miller Dairy Farm in Troy, metal piping from a sprinkler system at a United States Army Depot in Rotterdam, and parts of the lower cabinets are from the former Wagar Brothers farm in Brunswick.

"Whole Foods took us in a whole new direction as of December," said Sue. "We weren't even thinking of it."